lent day 7: a quick vignette
when i was in middle school/high school and rode on school buses and was near the front, i was always fascinated by the fact that the left windshield wiper and the right windshield wiper of almost all of the school buses didn't go at the same speed. I never asked anyone why, but i always wondered. I also used to try to figure out the sync cycle, as in how long would it take for them to start at the same time? Some of the time it would be a quick cycle and then i could just watch it and verify it. Other times i couldn't track it because it was too gradual and close sync wouldn't be good enough for me.
now that i think about it, that may be one of the earliest forms of 'patterned chaos' that i can identify with, and it makes sense to me that that still sticks in my brain. Leonard Meyer's book on Emotional Meaning in Music and his other writings talk a lot about musical expectation and how breaking expectation is essential to generate meaning, and that's true in this case too. If the windshield wipers were always perfectly in sync, it wouldn't have created a memory, an imprint in my brain that will be with me for the rest of my life. In some ways it represents exactly why i became a composer and why a little bit of deliberate chaos in my life is so essential to me.
now that i think about it, that may be one of the earliest forms of 'patterned chaos' that i can identify with, and it makes sense to me that that still sticks in my brain. Leonard Meyer's book on Emotional Meaning in Music and his other writings talk a lot about musical expectation and how breaking expectation is essential to generate meaning, and that's true in this case too. If the windshield wipers were always perfectly in sync, it wouldn't have created a memory, an imprint in my brain that will be with me for the rest of my life. In some ways it represents exactly why i became a composer and why a little bit of deliberate chaos in my life is so essential to me.